Civil Rights

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  Resistance in the Bluegrass

  From the anti-segregation sit-ins of the 1960s to the 2020 protests in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, the rest of the nation—and often the world—has watched as Kentuckians boldly fought against injustice. In Resistance in the Bluegrass, Farrah Alexander outlines how Kentucky's activists have opposed racism, discrimination, economic inequality, and practices that accelerate climate change; advocated for better education, more humane immigration policies, and appropriate political representation; and supported LGBTQ+ and women's rights, while also celebrating decades of Kentucky contributions to social justice movements and the people behind them.

  Resistance in the Bluegrass gives engaged citizens—and those who ...Read More

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  The Gospel of Freedom

  Wilbur H. Siebert published his landmark study of the Underground Railroad in 1898, revealing a secret system of assisted slave escapes. A product of his time, Siebert based his research on the accounts of northern white male abolitionists. While useful in understanding the northern boundaries of the slaves' journey, Siebert's account leaves out the complicated narrative of assistance below the Mason-Dixon Line. In The Gospel of Freedom: Black Evangelicals and the Underground Railroad, author Alicestyne Turley positions Kentucky as a crucial "pass through" territory for escaping slaves and addresses the important contributions of white and black antislavery southerners who united ...Read More

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  The Assault on Elisha Green

  On June 8, 1883, Rev. Elisha Green was traveling by train from Maysville to Paris, Kentucky. At Millersburg, about forty students from the Millersburg Female College crowded onto the train, accompanied by their music teacher, Frank L. Bristow, and the college president, George T. Gould. Gould grabbed the reverend by the shoulder and ordered him to give up his seat. When Green refused, Bristow and Gould assaulted him until the conductor intervened and ordered the assailants to stop or he would throw them off of the train. Friends advised Green to take legal action, and he did, winning his case ...Read More

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  The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin

  Milton Rogovin (1909–2011) dedicated his photographic career to capturing the humanity of working-class people around the world—coal miners, factory workers, the urban poor, the residents of Appalachia, and other marginalized groups. He worked to equalize the relationship between photographer and subject in the making of pictures and encouraged his subjects' agency by photographing them on their own terms. Rogovin's powerful insight and immense sympathy for his subjects distinguish him as one of the most original and important documentary photographers in American history.

  Edited by Christopher Fulton, The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin is a multi-disciplinary study of the photographer's ...Read More

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  The Politics of Richard Wright

  A pillar of African American literature, Richard Wright is one of the most celebrated and controversial authors in American history. His work championed intellectual freedom amid social and political chaos. Despite the popular and critical success of books such as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Black Boy (1945), and Native Son (1941), Wright faced staunch criticism and even censorship throughout his career for the graphic sexuality, intense violence, and communist themes in his work. Yet, many political theorists have ignored his radical ideas.

  In The Politics of Richard Wright, an interdisciplinary group of scholars embraces the controversies surrounding Wright as a ...Read More

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  Southern History on Screen

  Hollywood films have been influential in the portrayal and representation of race relations in the South and how African Americans are cinematically depicted in history, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Help (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). With an ability to reach mass audiences, films represent the power to influence and shape the public's understanding of our country's past, creating lasting images—both real and imagined—in American culture.

  In Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016, editor Bryan Jack brings together essays from an international roster of scholars to ...Read More

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  Slaves, Slaveholders, and a Kentucky Community's Struggle Toward Freedom

  Countless lives were transformed by the war that split the nation, and many stories are yet to be revealed about how the Civil War and the Reconstruction era affected Kentuckians. One such narrative is that of Sandy Holt, who, in the summer of 1864, joined tens of thousands of former slaves and enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. He put his life on the line to secure the Union's survival and the end of slavery. Hundreds of miles away in a federal office, Sandy Holt's former owner, Joseph Holt, worked to achieve the same goals. No one could have ...Read More

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  John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights

  WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD

  John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina.

  Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from ...Read More

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  A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois

  Literary scholars and historians have long considered W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) an extremely influential writer and a powerful cultural critic. The author of more than one hundred books, hundreds of published articles, and founding editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis, Du Bois has been widely studied for his profound insights on the politics of race and class in America. An activist as well as a scholar, Du Bois proclaimed, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to ...Read More

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  Make Way for Her

  A girl afflicted with pyrokinesis tries to control her fire-starting long enough to go to a dance with a boy she likes. A woman trapped in a stalled marriage is excited by an alluring ex-con who enrolls in her YMCA cooking class. A teen accompanies her mother, a prestigious poet, to a writing conference where she navigates a misguided attraction to a married writer—who is, in turn, attracted to her mother—leaving her "inventing punishments for writers who believe in clichés as tired as broken hearts."

  In this affecting collection, Katie Cortese explores the many faces of love and desire. Featuring ...Read More